The New Testament is a play
Bible scholars are doing a startling re-reading of the Christian scriptures
After a childhood spent going to church, I went to try and understand what the hell the Bible was “saying.” I looked into many matters, and realized there was quite a task with the letters of the apostle Paul.
He was a writer at the core of Christianity. There are vast libraries of commentaries and studies about his letters, all concealing the problem that their meaning is typically unclear. As Voltaire joked: “The Epistles of St Paul are so sublime, it is often difficult to understand them.”
But now I’m looking now over a shocking case being made in Bible scholarship. Could Paul have been a badly misread playwright?
Christians who say what Paul’s letters “mean” are trying hard to keep a secret.
His letters say one thing, very often, as they also say the opposite—even if it’s not the position that the Christians choose to emphasize.
Consider the case of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. This is one of the most famous passages by Paul, and often the only one that defines him for many people. He tells women to be “quiet” and “submissive.”
The words in the old KJV translation are famous:
“Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.”
The passage has been cited endlessly by Christian men to establish their supremacy.
They don’t like to mention that Paul had just said the opposite thing—twice. In 1 Corinthians 14:31, Paul said that all can “prophesy.”
Again in 14:39, he said that “brothers and sisters” should speak in church.
Christian men who wanted women to be ‘quiet’ kept that quiet. But by the late 19th century, Bible scholars were thinking about the problem.
But 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 has more problems. Why are Christian women called ‘your women’? That doesn’t sound so Christian. And what is Paul’s reference when he says “as also the law says”?
The Old Testament has no ban on female speech.
The Bible, truly, is the very last book in the world to prohibit female speech. From Old Testament to New, women talk all the time. There are female political leaders, like Deborah. There are female prophets, from Myriam to Anna to Mary Magdalene. God often talks to women directly, as in Genesis 25:22, when Rebekah “went to inquire of the Lord.”
So there was no reason ever to think that God restricts female speech. The conclusion many reached is that Paul must have had some personal misogyny, and inserted that into Christianity.
But Paul often praises women, and describes himself as a woman. He’s a woman in labor (Gal. 4:19), a nursing mother (1 Thess 2:7), and a weaning mother (1 Cor 3:2). It doesn’t sound so misogynist.
In the early 20th century, Katharine Bushnell made a startling suggestion.
A self-taught Bible scholar in an age when women weren’t even allowed in seminaries, Bushnell was one of the smartest humans, I’d say, who has ever lived. She processed the Bible like a supercomputer, and saw a theme about Paul’s letters that had been overlooked for millennia.
He worked off questions, and then gave replies.
In Bushnell’s 1921 book God’s Word to Women, she traced how throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul took questions, as his replies were marked with phrases like ‘With regards to…’ (cf. 7:1; 7:25; 8:1; 12:1; 16:1; 16:12).
The 1st Corinthians ‘letter’ seemed to represent some kind of dynamic conversation.
And at times, other voices seemed to be present in the text. Bushnell suggested the speaker of 14:34–35 was a Jew trying to keep up the Old Testament ‘Law’.
The reason? A ban on female speech is not found in the Bible but is found in the Talmud. This is not because of a ‘law’ enforcing female inferiority. Judaism doesn’t have such a concept.
The ban owed to concerns over ritual ‘impurity’ from menstruation.
Later Bible scholars developed Bushnell’s case even further.
The first word of 1 Corinthians 14:36 is the Greek word, ē, which the KJV translated as ‘What?—though it is removed from many translations.
This word has the force of reversal. As Gilbert Bilezikian explains: “Paul uses the ē particle to express disapproval of existing situations.”
Here is the KJV text of 1 Corinthians 14:34–36 formatted as dialogue:
TRADITIONAL JEW: Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
PAUL: What? came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you only?
Christianity had read Paul’s ‘letters’ as something like essays on sex and power.
When read as dialogues, however, the familiar words took on wholly new meanings. They became discussions, typically, of obscure details related to Old Testament law and Jewish experience.
In a 1987 paper, Thomas P. Shoemaker found that the infamous 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, the ‘head covering’ passage, read as a dialogue.
Instead of God saying that women should mark their subservience by wearing hats—the traditional Christian view—the passage turned into a discussion of a ritual described in Numbers 5:18.
In a 2008 paper, Denny Burk looks at 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 and sees an interplay between two voices. As he puts it, the flow of text seems “dialogical, not monological. In other words, Paul is having a back-and-forth conversation with an interlocutor.”
Longer and longer passages in Paul’s ‘letters’ began to read like dialogue set pieces.
A startling example is found in Romans 3, which seems to find Paul arguing with himself. In a 1984 paper, Stanley Stowers found that the passage is “a full-scale dialogue of questions and answers between the author and an imaginary interlocutor.”
Later scholars developed the reading. The passage finds ‘Paul’ explaining to a ‘Jew’ why the Jewish thing was necessary, if Christianity was the divine plan all along. The two voices go on and on:
TRADITIONAL JEW: What advantage is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision?
PAUL: There is much in every way! First of all, the Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God.
TRADITIONAL JEW: To what end? If some lack faith, their lack of faith will not nullify God’s faith, will it?
The dialogue seems to extend down to 3:19, with ‘Paul’ explaining: “Through the law, we become conscious of our sin.”
And scholars began to think about the context in which the ‘letters’ had been performed.
Letters in the first century weren’t read silently. They were read aloud. The ‘reader’ was like an actor performing the text, as if becoming the person who sent the letter. As Adam G. White writes:
“The task of the lector was to represent the voice and persona of the author; he was expected to re-enact and bring to life the original performance of the text through appropriate facial expressions, gesticulations, and vocal infections.”
Paul refers in the letters to the people who were sent out to ‘read’ his letters to audiences. One of them was Phoebe (cf. Romans 16:1-2). In a startling 2011 paper, the scholar Allan Chapple detailed how a woman was named as often ‘performing’ the apostle Paul.
Paul’s letters were read to Christian audiences, most typically after a meal.
In ancient Rome, this was a familiar pattern. Following a meal there would be entertainments and theatrical presentations.
The typical performer was a slave, or “slaves for our pleasure,” as the Roman attitude toward actors would have been.
But Paul often calls himself a ‘slave’.
The meaning of the ‘letters’ can shift wildly if imagined as performed in such settings.
Paul writes, for example, of his words being digested like a meal. In Colossians 3:16, he offers: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…”
But to imagine the ‘letters’ as performed after meals in such settings opened up a totally new inquiry about Paul writing for public venues. As Glen Holland puts it in a 2015 paper on that subject:
“Paul presumably wrote his letters in such a way as to enhance their efficacy when they were read aloud to the members of his congregations, employing some of the same techniques so useful in delivering speeches, the tools of rhetoric.”
There were dialogues, it seemed, with various ‘characters’ speaking.
There were also monologues by biblical characters.
That startling reading was developed by Stanley Stowers in a 1994 paper about Romans 7:5–25. He found this passage made little sense if seen to becoming from Paul. But it made perfect sense if read as a speech by a biblical character, as if someone stepped up and performed a speech.
Stowers thought the character being performed was Adam. Later scholars fine-tuned the reading. The speaker was actually Eve.
Stowers found that four other passages in Romans alone seemed to him to be spoken in another voice, though identifying the ‘character’ is tricky. It raised the prospect that Paul’s ‘letters’ were more like linked skits.
Then scholars began to wonder what exactly Paul’s profession had been.
The apostle is often imagined by Christians as a manual laborer who happens to go around writing letters telling everyone what to do.
Paul’s profession is actually a bit of a mystery. It is identifed in a single Bible verse. In Acts 18:3, Paul, with Aquila and Priscilla, is described as a σκηνοποιός, or skēnopoioi.
What does that mean?
Christianity will tell you that it is defined by etymology, and means ‘tent’ and ‘maker’, and so ‘tentmaker’. They know that there is no ancient usage of skēnopoioi to refer to the occupation of making tents.
In fact, Christianity knew what the word meant. It is the first meaning given in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, which is ignored.
The word used in Acts 18:3 is also defined in an ancient dictionary, the Onomasticon by Julius Pollux, as referring to “makers of the skênê” or “scene-makers.” It was a word from theater.
There are many usages of this word group in the context of ancient Greek theater.
It was used by Aristotle and others. Scholars of theater have long thought about what it means in that context.
A skēnopoioi, many think, was basically a “producer.”
Many scholars believe the apostle Paul’s profession was a ‘maker’ of theater.
The apostle’s ‘letters’ are actually full of references to classical theater. Paul knew them all — Aeschylus, Euripides, Menander, on and on. Paul was unusually well-versed in pagan theater, and he also uses theatrical language for biblical theology. As he says in 1 Corinthians 4:9:
“We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings.”
It is not at all difficult to imagine Paul as working in theater. As the scholar L.L. Welborn puts it:
“This would go far to explain the number, specificity, and richness of Pauline metaphors drawn from the world of the theater and amphitheater (e.g., 2 Cor. 11.1–12.10; Phil. 3.12–4.3, etc.).”
But it isn’t difficult to imagine Jesus working in theater either.
In a still shocking 1984 paper, “Jesus and the Theatre,” Richard A. Batey traced how near ancient theaters and theatrical imagery were to the world of the gospels. And as he puts it: “Even the style of Jesus’ teachings exemplifies a unique dramatic quality.”
The range of Jesus’ theatrical reference is suppressed in Christian translations. We read, for example, that Jesus calls his opponents “hypocrites.” What he really says is that they are ‘actors’.
But the New Testament vision seems to be that Jesus, as a divine being, was an actor ‘playing’ the part of a human. As Clement of Alexandria put it in his Protrepticus, or ‘Exhortation to the Greeks’:
“The Lord, despised in appearance, worshipped in deed, the purifying, saving, and gentle divine Word, the most manifest God, equal to the Master of all because He was His Son and ‘the Word was in God,’ was neither disbelieved when first proclaimed, nor unrecognized when He took on the mask of humanity and, fashioned in flesh, performed the saving drama of humanity.”
Then path of Christianity seems to be to realize everyone is an actor.
Jesus is a new ‘role’ to play. As Origen, the 3rd century church father, put it, we are all actors in the ‘theater of the world’. He adds:
“We all, as contenders for the prize, always put on masks. If we are blessed, we put on so to speak the mask of God …”
Put on the mask of God! That was advice I never heard in church. But thinking about it, Christian theology suddenly seems realistic. Humans are performative creatures. We are constantly playing roles. And ‘Jesus’ is a new role to play: a feeling, inquisitive being in dialogue with the world.
The church that I attended as a boy seemed very far from ‘the theater’. And yet, as I thought about it, churches and theaters are laid out the same. We called ourself a ‘congregation’ with a ‘pastor’. We were actually just an audience, as the man on stage was an actor.
What did we know, I wondered, about Paul—or rather, Saul?
That enigmatic man at the start of the Christian project. I found myself thinking about an ancient playwright who set to work dramatizing the Jesus story. He preceded all the gospels. His spirit infuses them.
What’s known about him, really, isn’t much, though I did find myself studying a 9th century portrait of him, described as “one of the earliest author portraits of the Apostle in Western manuscript tradition…”
I doubt that I’m the first person to notice he’s wearing a theater mask? I seem to be the first person to say it. 🔶
